Abstract
Mereological nihilism is the thesis that composition never occurs. Sider has defended nihilism on the basis of its relative ideological simplicity. In this paper I develop the argument from ideological simplicity, and defend it from some recent objections. Along the way I discuss the best way to formulate nihilism, what it means for a theory to exhibit lesser or greater degrees of ideological simplicity, the relationship between the parthood relation and the identity relation, and the notion that we should judge the ideological simplicity of competing theories on the basis of the kinds of ideological commitments required by those theories.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 7431–7448 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Synthese |
Volume | 198 |
Issue number | 8 |
Early online date | 7 Jan 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Aug 2021 |
Scopus Subject Areas
- Philosophy
- Social Sciences(all)
User-Defined Keywords
- Composition
- Ideological simplicity
- Ideology
- Mereological nihilism
- Special composition question
- Theoretical simplicity